UKC

Can anyone suggest a piece of free software or a way to do this in excel?

A colleague is trying to schedule a carousel of activities for 120 children.

120 children have each selected 5 preferred activities from a total of 9 options (they will do 4 of these selected 5)

9 presenters are all willing to present their sessions in each of 4 time slots - they are willing to repeat sessions.

There are 5 rooms available so 5 sessions can run simultaneously.

The data is currently held in an excel sheet with 120 rows (children) and 9 columns (available sessions) with the children's preferences indicated by letters in their rows.

I can't think of a way to efficiently timetable and allocate the sessions to make sure that all students are allocated one of their preferred activities in each of the 4 time slots without clashes or blanks.

When I have allocated the children to sessions it needs to be printable so I have a master timetable and individual timetables for all 120 kids, which I can give to them so they know where to go.

Sorry, it's not free or Excel but I have done something very similar scheduling round robin one to one networking sessions using Microsoft Project. But this was some years ago and hopefully software has moved on since then!

What is the capacity of the rooms? Can they all take all 120 or is one a broom cupboard? 

What is the capacity of the presenters? Can one do a talk to all 120 but another is a 1-to-1 face painter?

I've done something for organising groups for very different constraints (speed networking) but group size was key to practicality.

Try GitHub?

I think all presenters and rooms can take about 30, but will check.

Will have a look at Github thanks.